How to get better at UI design

In the quest of becoming a good UI designer, you can come a long way by reading books, attending conferences, formally educating yourself, trying out tutorials, or just experimenting on your own. However, if you want to go into hyper-speed in bettering your UI design skills, the best way to learn is to work with other designers. Find them at your workplace, hire them, or spend time online in the User Experience- or Interaction-Designer world.
Categorized in: interaction design, user testing, personas, scenarios, resource, conferences, pattern libraries, ux, ia, use cases, user experience, clean, sketching tips
For learning on your own, I have collected a list of various resources that will help you on your way to becoming a good designer. However, before you start, choose your specialty: don’t try to learn everything. Choose your desired skills and branch out from there.

Here we go:

Fundamental design concepts
Learn the basic principles: The gestalt laws, Fitt’s law, about affordance, feedback, etc. The book Universal Principles of Design gives a great introduction to these and much more (100 principles total).
Books to read
• The Design of Everyday things by Donald Norman
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• Universal Principles of Design by Lidwell, Holden, and Butler
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Sketching
Sketching is great for trying out ideas fast and receive rapid feedback. It provides a great tool for discussing ideas and exploring different possibilities. Paper prototyping is fast, cheap, and effective: much faster than coding a digital prototype.

Before you buy any books on the subject, check out these UI-pattern.com blog posts on the subject: Drawing corners and boxes, Drop Shadow, Use a thick pen, Get your arm off the paper, Constrain yourself.
Books to read
• Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
• Paper prototyping by Carolyn Snyder

Usability testing
Discount testing is cheap and easy. The most common approach is the Thinking aloud approach. It will help you quickly test if other people than yourself understand your abstractions. Sometimes it is enough to just grab anybody you can find, give them some tasks to do, and see how well they perform. This will rid most obvious errors that you did not see yourself.

The more advanced lab-based user testing is a science in itself. It will help you once you have removed the obvious errors from your design and is ready to move into the more psychological and engaging factors of usability.
Books to read
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Handbook of Usability Testing

User research
One thing is to test whether what you have designed actually works – another thing is getting to the point where you have something to test.

User research is about understanding and engaging in your users. Understanding in what scenarios/situations your users interact with your product, how they interact with your product, and what motivates them to do so.

User research is most often formalized in personas and scenarios, and use-cases.
Books to read
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper (On personas)
• The Persona Lifecycle by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
• About face by Cooper, Reinmann, and Cronin
• Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky

Information architecture
Information architecture is about designing how your design works and how its parts play together. The information architect creates structure and principles to make something work in a clear and consistent way.
Books to read
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
• Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

Interaction design
Interaction design is about… well designing interactions. It’s about designing the connection between your software interface and how it is to be used by the user.
Books to read
• About face by Cooper
• Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by Sharp, Rogers, and Preece

UI pattern libraries
UI pattern libraries showcase recurring solutions that solve common problems. They are a great way to study how others have solved the same problems that you are dealing with yourself – and in a way that has become a standard.
Websites
• UI-patterns.com by Anders Toxboe
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library by Yahoo!
• Welie by Martijn van Welie
• UI Pattern factory by Janne Lammi
• Designing Web Interfaces

Web design weblogs
There are many out there with great content that will help you learn about both user experience, interaction, business concepts in web design, graphical design, and more. The following list is a very selection of all the great websites out there:
Websites
• Boxes and arrows
• UX mag
• Signal vs noise – company blog of 37signals
• UX matters
• Smashing magazine
• A list apart
• Bokardo by Joshua Porter
• Creating passionate users by Kathy Sierra – it’s dead, but has got so much valuable information

Conferences
There are many out there. Here’s a few conferences to attend:
• Information Architecture Summit
• South by Southwest
• Carsonified events – FOWA, FOWD, etc.
• UX London
• Web App Summit
• Web 2.0 Summit
• dConstruct

More?
Please do contribute in the comments with your suggestions.

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